


Expectations

by galacticproportions



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Communication, Consent, Ecocide, Ecosystems, Exploration, F/F, First Time, Generational Trauma, Getting Together, Memory, Oral Sex, Really not kidding about the insects, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 01:56:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14322000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Rey and Rose get to know the planet where they're based a little better, and each other, too.





	Expectations

**Author's Note:**

> You know, I started to type, "I hope this story about prickly and traumatized weirdos slowly learning how to be with each other pleases someone besides me," and then I remembered _where_ I was typing. I feel like my odds are better here than they might be elsewhere, and I'm very grateful for that.
> 
> Special gratitude to Gloss and Orchis for the remote writing dates which gave me the beginning and also the end of this story.

On the first approach to the new base, they had seen that Siyak was a moon with two levels, the dry uplands where they eventually set down and deep valleys or canyons thick with vegetation. What with getting everything set up, not to mention mourning the dead and taking advantage of not being dead yet, they'd mostly been relieved that they appeared to be the only sentients on their plateau. It was Rose who pointed out that for all they knew, the lowlands or the other plateaus could be inhabited and that they should at least try to find out who they might be inhabited by.

“Okay,” Poe said, “Take Rey and a tent and three days of rations and find out what's over there. Down. Out there, whatever.”

“Why me? And why take Rey?”

“Your idea. And I feel like having a Force-sensitive person who could probably also take out a wampa with one hand is going to improve your odds.” Poe sighs and drops the act. “Also I'm worried about her. I thought maybe this would give her something else to pay attention to.”

This, Rose understands, so she salutes--mockingly, of course--and says, "I'll go ask Finn about a tent.” That'll be easy. Finn gives her everything she wants. Asking Rey might be a little harder.

 

*

 

They don't always talk well together, but they work well together: they got to know each other through keeping the Falcon aloft. These days, it's truly unbelievable how much there is to fix, how much of what the Resistance receives is broken-down or outdated or glitchy, and even though both of them have plenty of other tasks to do it's very settling to sit on opposite sides of an industrial solderer and try and get a few more cycles of work out of it.

“Hand me the one on the right,” Rey says over the presently-inert chunk of metal.

Rose looks to her left, Rey's right. There's a sparkwrench, two screwdrivers and something that looks like it was welded together out of pieces of armor. She figures it's not that one. “The wrench, the flathead or the stardrive?” 

“Screwdriver,” Rey grunts, trying to pry something up with her fingers. By this, Rose judges that she wants the flathead, and she hands it over.

When Rose wants a tool or a component, she asks for it by name. When Rose learned to fix things, she learned in company, all the kids in her compound working under older kids or adults to learn how to repair and how to sabotage. As a Resistance mechanic, she's been part of a team all her working life--not always a competent team, or a mentally stable team, but a team.

Rey did her learning in the desert, by trial and error. They both learned to work hungry and tired and in pain, but Rey never had to explain to anyone what she was doing, or follow anyone's instructions. She just did whatever it was until it worked.

This makes working with her incredibly frustrating, sometimes. It also means she doesn't really think in terms of what can't be done, which makes working with her plain incredible.

Rey pries off the corroded section of housing and makes a happy noise as she gets at the guts of the solderer, like a gaul-crow over a particularly tasty piece of roadkill. Rose smiles to herself and continues cleaning the ignition elements, working her rod and rag in between the begrimed contact points.

When they're as clean as they're going to get and still not responding to a turn of the sparkwrench, she turns her attention to the plugs and examines them with a lot of care as she says, “Do you want to explore the ravines with me?”

A stillness: all vibrations, all scrapings, from the other side cease. “I have to practice.”

“You can practice when we make camp.” Silence, silence, silence. “You'll be able to tell if there's anything down there that wants to hurt us?” She makes this a question because she's not a hundred percent sure that's how the Force works.

“Maybe,” Rey admits. “I can probably tell if someone specifically wants specifically us specifically dead. I don't know about things like animals.” There's a small, very faint scratching sound on the alloy as she starts working again. Rose says carefully, and nervously, “I'd feel better if you were with me.”

The scratching stops again, and starts again. “Okay,” Rey says.

“You'll go?”

“We'll go,” Rey corrects, and pokes her head around the butt-end of the solderer. Rose said the thing about feeling better more because it was true than because she thought it would work, but she notices that Rey's cheeks are a little bit pink and she says to herself: _Oh. I wonder if that's what this is._

 

*

 

It takes a while to find a good way down, and what gets them going eventually is what almost looks like a path: a thread of clearing through the scrub that coats the upper slopes of the ravine, though not as thickly as it grows on the plateau. “People could have made this,” Rey says.

“Sentient people or any kind of people?”

“I meant sentients, but did you mean any kind?”

“I usually mean any kind,” Rose says. “Ooh, hey, look at this.” As they descend, the dirt is getting loamier and full of ledges, big terraced folds in the incline. The Siyak scrub is interspersed with two more kinds of plants: a foamy cascade of tiny leaves on long bendy twigs and a broad-bladed grass with tiny mauve flowers that, in another light, might be blue, just as the foliage that's gray here might be green elsewhere. There are some bits of metal detritus off to the side of the path, and Rose scrapes at one with a thumbnail, spits on it, taps a tooth on it. “Some kind of alloy, copper and something.”

“That's worked metal,” Rey says. “And not ship's metal, so not from the shipyard.”

“Could've been,” Rose says. “Some people cook in copper alloy—hey!” One of the tiny winged creatures that's been investigating the flowered grasses has come to investigate her ear instead, and the sound of its wings so close is thunderous and alarming. She swats at it frantically and it zooms off. Turning back, she catches sight of Rey, in fighting stance and fierce expression, and draws her taser without thinking about it. “What is it?”

Rey turns the expression at her. “You tell me! You were the one flapping around!”

Rose stares, and laughs, and holsters her taser again. “It was a bug. I think. Some kind of little flying guy. Nothing we need to worry about.” Of course there are bugs that can really do a number on you, but if it were one of those it would already be back. She thinks.

“Little _flying_ guy,” Rey repeats. “Like an insect.”

“Did you have insects on Jakku?”

Rey looks insulted, like Rose has slandered her home, even though Rose knows for a fact she hated everything about that planet. “Of course. Shieldbugs and vatal were the main ones. Vatal get in your skin if you sit on their nests.”

Rose shudders.

“You have to pick them out with metal splinters,” Rey adds. “Do you think they have anything like that here?” They're among trees now, broader-leaved to soak up as much as possible of Siyak's dim, diffuse light; it's not just cooler-feeling but somehow cooler- _smelling_ under the trees, and when night sinks into the valley it'll be cooler yet. The trees are uniformly thin in the trunk. Slow-growing? Second growth, after people cut the older, larger trees, or they died off on their own? Rose isn't sure.

Rey's the one who hears the sound of water first and makes for it, calling Rose after her. It's a small but deep stream undercutting a bank thickly grown with ferns and fleshy-flowered things that are crawling with more insects, small and pearly-orange, and fat spotted slimy things like dollops of algae pudding, with eyes on long stalks.

Rose's eyes are filling with tears. By the time she came along, Hays Minor did not have slugs, or ferns, or clear fast-running water. Auntie VyVy, Uncle Blia and Uncle Arn, who took the most care of Rose and Paige until they were all old enough that the caring switched over, would sometimes say, “This is where the yari used to grow. Yari likes dry soil, lots of sun, because it's a plant of water and it helps the body with its water. If someone you know is having trouble where they pee too much, or their lower back is hurting them and it's not the muscles, you make them yari tea,” or, “Chhob roots are tough. Let's check here in the spring, maybe they'll be back,” even though they never were. And the stories they told were set not in the sky but on the ground and in the water, with animal con artists, elders, and fools—all the people whom Rose already knew, young as she was, that she would never get to meet. Sentients travel; nearly everyone else stays put, and when their world dies, they die too, except for the few that have learned to live pretty much anywhere.

Rose reaches out and touches one of the dollops with a fingertip—and snatches it away, yelping with the burn. She has just enough sense not to put her finger in her mouth, and dunks it in the stream instead, but the burn doesn't abate and her finger is throbbing. Rey is watching her with alarm, is saying something, but Rose is hearing Uncle Blia's voice, creaking with dust, saying, “Look for the remedy next to the injury.” Her unhurt hand hovers over a frond of the fern where the slugs are resting. “Ask permission!” Auntie VyVy's voice scolds, and she does, and waits, and plucks the frond, and rubs it on her blistering finger.

The pain falls away almost instantly, freeing Rose to look up at Rey's worried face, her half-open mouth. It occurs to Rose that to Rey, what she was doing must have looked completely insane. She explains.

Rey is always uncomplicatedly pleased when someone else demonstrates a skill she doesn't have, so Rose was half-expecting the approving nods, but she wasn't expecting the shy question that follows: “Tell me about them?” Rey asks. “Your auntie and your uncles. You lived with them? You and Paige?”

So Rose's stories of the compound wind along the streambank, punctuated by injunctions to, “Ooh, look at this!”--mostly from Rose at first, but then from Rey too as she starts to notice the kinds of things that Rose has been pointing out to her. When she indicates a patch of purple-gray fungi growing on a fallen trunk, she sounds as proud as though she grew it herself. They have a few empty medicine bottles and scraps of oiled cloth to wrap samples in, to take back to base for assay. Since the slug incident they've been more careful about touching things with their bare hands, and Rose reminds Rey now, “Ask permission before you take any of it.”

“Why?”

“Well, it's polite.”

Rey frowns. “But no one's going to _ask_ to cut my arm off. And if they did ask, I'd say no.”

“That's why you don't take all of it. If you take all of it, it's like cutting off an arm. If you just take a little bit, maybe it can spare that. It's more like your hair. If someone wanted to see if they could eat your hair, wouldn't you want them to ask before they took a little bit?”

Rey's hand flies up to her hair, a gesture so unthought that Rose wonders briefly if that was a bad example, even though it's the way that Auntie VyVy explained it to her. The two things she knows about Rey's hair are that it's never been cut and that no one she's ever talked to has ever seen it down. But then she snorts and says, “I guess so. Yeah, I guess,” and poises her hand over the fungus, closes her eyes, and lets stillness settle over her, the way she does when she's practicing.

Rose watches her with suspicion and awe. Whenever she and Paige were planetside someplace with a functioning ecosystem and she gathered plants, she did the asking thing, and it's true that once or twice she felt very definitely that she shouldn't take a stem or root. But most of the time nothing shifted at all, and she took that as her yes; it never occurred to her that this process had anything to do with the Force, since she couldn't use it herself, or that there might be a way to receive an unambiguous response. Rey is certainly waiting longer than Rose ever does, her face and her whole self still, expectant, open, and then slowly shifting into the posture and expression of someone who's heard and understood. Her eyes open, and she reaches down to gently break off one of the delicate purplish fans where it joins the log, and fold it equally gently into a packet of oiled cloth. “That was _great,_ ” she says, very seriously. “I didn't know I could do that. I didn't know _it_ could do that.”

“It talked to you?” Unlike Rey, Rose gets jealous when other people can do things she can't do. She is jealous of Rey now, Rey who can be sure of the answer she's getting, can be sure that communication is what's happening.

Rey stows the packet in her beltpack. “Sort of?” she says. “I hate having to say the Force is hard to explain, but it's hard to explain. Just, at first I didn't know if it was okay to take some, and then I did know, and it was like I'd always known it.”

“You were sure.”

“Yeah. That's what it feels like a lot of the time, you know, like showing you something you knew the whole time. Or reminding you where you left something.” Rey breaks off, and her eyes narrow, making Rose tense again, but before she can ask what's wrong Rey's hopping across the stream, a neat little bound, bunching and stretching up again. She smiles at Rose from the other side, and Rose says, “How come?”

“I wanted to see if I could do it.”

Rose has seen Rey practicing, has seen her leap from a standstill and from a run. She doesn't know exactly how far Rey can jump, but she knows that Rey knows, to a finger's width. Knows it's farther than this, much farther. She thinks maybe Rey was jumping away from the conversation. But Rey sounds happy, and when she jumps back over to Rose's side of the stream she looks even happier. “Come on,” she says. “It'll be dark soon and I'm hungry. Let's see if we can find a place to put up the tent that doesn't have all this...stuff.”

The clearing they find is a relatively recent one, where a tree in falling has taken down or bent aside a couple of its neighbors. The ground is brittle with almost-black moss that must have dried out in the new exposure to sunlight, though Siyak's sun never feels strong enough to Rose to wither anything. It crunches and tickles underfoot as they set up the tent, and under their butts as they munch their ration bars and chew their dried cactus pears. “It's easier to breathe down here,” Rey says, after a deep inhale through her nose and a deep sigh out.

“It's the plants, probably. And the nighttime. Plants that give off oxygen do it more at night.”

“Oh,” Rey says, hushed and pleased. “I like that, I didn't know that.” She passes Rose the canteen.

Rose sips and passes it back. The wind that sweeps across the plateau is tossing the canopy above them, but the air around them is still. The longer they stay quiet, the more night sounds they hear: insects that chirrup and insects that hum, faint scratchings, a long liquid call that could be anything but sounds too far away to worry about. She says, “If there was anyone...big...around here, would we know?”

“Maybe,” Rey says. “I told you I can't be sure. The forest knows we're here, I can feel that.”

“I wish I could feel it,” Rose says, and then hates herself for sounding jealous again, small and mean. Rey either doesn't notice or doesn't care. She says thoughtfully, “I might be able to share it. It works with Finn sometimes. Give me your hands?” She pivots toward Rose and sits kneeling, holding her own hands out.

Palm to palm, calluses scraping, warmth of skin and flesh and blood and bone: Rose sits and breathes and tries to quiet her mind the way Rey tells her, but that's all she gets.

And yet it feels like a lot. She opens her eyes and Rey's are open too, now, measuring, _figuring._ Some things you don't need the Force for.

She asks, “Do you want to kiss me?”

Rey nods as though, Rose thinks, her mouth is stuck. They both lean forward, press their lips together, dry and soft. Then again, wetter, softer. Then more, and more, and more.

Rey doesn't kiss the way she moves and she doesn't kiss the way she uses the Force. She kisses the way she fixes things, determination and discovery, trying and finding, with little mumbles of satisfaction when Rose does something she likes or when she does something that makes Rose shiver. Her hands grip Rose's upper arms, not tight enough to hurt but making it impossible for Rose to do what she would like to do, which is press her whole body up against Rey's and then maybe—“You wanna get in the tent?”

Rey holds her away, looking. “Why?”

Rose pushes down just a little feeling of _Do I have to do everything myself._ She doesn't, that's the point, it's just that this is how you do things with another person. She says, “We could lie down. In the tent. If you wanna lie down, like, together.”

The measuring face again, then a small firm nod. “Okay,” Rey says, but doesn't move, so Rose crawls in first and hears Rey crawling after her—probably gracefully and without putting her knees down on any knobbly roots. Rose squeezes awake the cool-light bobble that hangs from the apex of the tent: she doesn't know exactly why but whatever they're going to do, even if it's nothing, she doesn't want to do it in the dark.

They're facing each other again, not touching. Rose feels stubborn. She doesn't want to ask this time, but she also wants very much to be kissing Rey again, kissing and touching her, and is just about to decide that she wants that just a bit more than she wants to not ask, when Rey says a little belligerently, “I've never done anything besides kissing with another person.”

“We don't have to do anything besides kissing,” Rose says quickly. “I don't have any. You know. _Expectations_. We can do whatever you want. We can just go to sleep.”

“No, I want to, I just mean I don't know how.”

“Oh.” Rose reflects. “What about with yourself? I mean, touching yourself? Do you like that?”

“Yeah, and I like kissing you too, don't worry, but--”

Rose waits, but there's no more forthcoming, so she says, “I guess nobody knows how with anybody else, at first. I can tell you what I like, if you want to try. Do you?”

“Yes,” Rey says, but she doesn't move. The cool light makes her look far away and makes it hard to assess her expression. Is she scared, frustrated, excited, does she want this at all? She says she does. She gave Rose that much.

Rose remembers fooling around with Giap behind the hopper, the older girl breathing the smell of licorice next to her ear, explaining what to do and how to touch. “It's easier if I sit in front of you, with my back to you. Like, between your legs. Then it's the same angle.”

“Oh. Right. Okay.”

Neither of them moves for another long moment, Rose counting the thumps of her pulse in her lips, in her knees where the ground is digging into them, in her fingertips where they're pressed against Rey's upper arms. Then, clumsily for her and shyly, Rey adjusts so that her butt is on the ground and her knees are spread and bent, making a place for Rose to sit.

Rose turns around and sort of scoots up to her backwards, and for whatever weird reason the act of doing this turns her on even more. She says, “See, now you can get your hand--”

“Right, got it.” But Rey's first move is to reach not downward but upward, to pull Rose's face into a neck-craned, sharp-angled kiss. It goes on and on and sets Rose's pulse pounding again all through the core of her body, until her spine aches and her cunt aches and she's whispering into Rey's mouth, “Touch me, touch me, please.”

So Rey zips down the coverall and reaches inside, cupping and tracing gently at first. “You can squeeze,” Rose says, “and pinch—yeah—“ She presses backwards, into Rey's body, seeking her mouth again, the nipple that Rey isn't pinching and rolling still springing up in sympathy against her undershirt. “Is that good?” Rey's whispering hotly, doubtfully, in her ear.

“Yeah, it's so good.”

“Your hair is poking me.”

“Take out the clips for me then.” Rose bends her head down.

It takes Rey a minute to do it one-handed, and once she's done it she keeps combing and stroking through Rose's hair with that hand while her fingertips rub and circle Rose's nipples and she mouths at Rose's neck. “Bite a little,” Rose suggests, and squirms when Rey does.

“What else?”

“Put your hand lower.”

“Like here?” She strokes and squeezes Rose's belly where it's soft and bulgy, smooths the trail of hair below her navel and seems to get distracted by it for a while, or maybe she's trying to tease or maybe she's just nervous. Rose wants to ask if she's okay, and also to snap at her to get a move on. “I like how you feel here,” Rey says, settling that question. “You want me to, er.”

“Touch my clit,” Rose says, and then, “that's the part right at the top, you know, where you touch when--” Rey makes a noise that Rose is very familiar with, the one that means _I know that._ But she also reaches downward, and it's almost right. “A little to the left,” Rose says, “a little faster, Rey, yeah, perfect—wait, softer than that, I'll tell you--” when I want it hard, she was about to say, but Rey has found just the friction and speed she needs right now and every bit of intention and intelligence Rose has is concentrated literally at Rey's fingertips.

Which suddenly are moving lower still. “Wait, hold on, I don't like anything inside.” Rey tenses. “I should've told you. Rey, it's okay, I'm sorry, I should've said before.”

“No, I'm sorry. I was just thinking about what I like, when my thighs start shaking like that, that's what I want.”

Rose hadn't realized her thighs were shaking, but files this information about Rey with her few working brain cells. “Can you go back to what you were doing before? And kiss me at the same time?” She cranes her neck again to meet Rey's mouth, and she's there, they both are, Rey's hand flicking steady and light, bringing her closer, closer. “Rose, lean back,” Rey whispers, “lean back, I'm strong, I can hold you up.”

Why is that hot? Why does she even want it? She wants it so badly—wants to hear it, wants it to be true. She leans back and it is true, Rey holds steady, steel-firm except for that one fluttering motion of her hand and the corresponding roll in the muscles of her arm. “Little harder now,” Rose says, “Rey, please, a little more—fuck,” and orgasm lifts and shakes her, drops her limp against Rey's chest. She lets her head roll back so that they're cheek to cheek. Licks the sweat off Rey's neck, feels her shiver.

Rose sits up and twists around. Rey's cheeks are flushed dark in the blue light. “Now me,” she says—what is it about her tone and her expression? “Switch places?”

It's determination, Rose decides, and it's adorable. “We could,” she says. “Or I could use my mouth instead? If you like that?” She likes doing it, and tasting Rey's sweat made her think of it.

“I don't know, remember?”

“Sorry.”

“No, me. I am, I mean. That was rude. I bet I will like it.” She frowns. “I want to say something but I don't know how to say it without being rude again.”

“You can just say it.” It does make Rose nervous, partly because she has no idea what it could be, and she's sitting here with her coveralls zipped down as far as they'll go and whatever this mysterious thing is, she and Rey will both be stuck with it—having said it, having heard it—once it's out.

“Do I have to talk as much as you?”

Rose opens her mouth but no sound comes out. “Sorry,” Rey says quickly. “I'm sorry. I just meant I don't know if I can explain it as well as you. And I don't want you to be confused. And I want--”

“You want to get off,” Rose finishes for her.

“Well. Yeah.” Rey says that the way she responds to any other obvious thing, with a little edge of scorn. It should be irritating under the circumstances, but it gives Rose the giggles. Rey doesn't laugh much, but she's smiling back.

“You could just, like, move me around,” Rose offers. “Move my hand. Or, um, my head. Or if you just say 'more,' I'll do more of whatever I'm doing.”

“Move you around,” Rey repeats, looking intrigued. “Like with the Force?”

“Oh.” That hadn't occurred to Rose, mostly because neither of her previous girlfriends had arcane and incalculable powers. “I think I just meant with your hands.”

“Another time then,” Rey says, and now she's definitely teasing. “Okay.” She reaches behind her and begins undoing ties and laces, half-squats and steps out of her pants and drawers. Rose forgets to breathe, looking at the slopes and planes of her, the faint points of her hipbones, nipples outward-turning, a jagged scar on one long thigh. “Do I sit?” Rey asks. “What do I do?”

“You could sit like you were before. You might want to lie down eventually.”

“Can you take yours off too? Your clothes?”

So Rose performs the contortions necessary to shed a coverall in a tent and tosses it to the side. When she turns back, Rey's staring. “Next time,” she says, “I want you to be naked the whole time and I want to watch you come when you're naked and I want to look at your face when I make you do it.”

Rose feels herself heating up all over again. “Open your legs for me,” she says, made bold by Rey's boldness, and when Rey does she places herself between them and kisses Rey long and deep. When she pulls back, Rey's breathing hard. She says, “I bet you can put your mouth lots of places,” and draws Rose's head down to her breast.

 _Now we're talking_ , Rose thinks, nicking Rey's nipple with her teeth, suckling and tasting, moving back up to Rey's mouth and neck and collarbone, licking the sweat out of it, kissing her breasts again and across to her armpits, soft tufts of hair and the meaty tang of her. Rose takes note: the collarbone thing is a big hit, the armpit-nuzzling seems to leave Rey indifferent but Rose likes how Rey smells so much that she'll probably keep doing it anyway. Her ribs are ticklish and her stomach muscles tense when Rose plants a patch of kisses just to the side of her bellybutton. “Is that a 'don't do that' thing?”

“I don't know. I wouldn't have thought it would be, but I guess it is.”

“I can skip it.” Rey's thighs have tensed too, and Rose spreads them gently with her hands, which, it turns out, are trembling.

They both notice it. Rey pulls her up, a strong pull but with no apparent exertion, and kisses her, salt sweat on both their lips. Kisses Rose's hands, too, backs and palms. “I want you to make me come,” she says. “With your mouth. I want you to.”

“Lie back,” Rose says, and Rey does. Rose sort of crouch-kneels and kisses the tops of Rey's thighs, the scarred one first, then the other one. She looks up Rey's body and into Rey's eyes—she's got her head propped up and she's looking down the length of herself, looking Rose right in the face. “Come on,” she says, and then, “I mean, if you're ready.”

“I'm so ready,” Rose says, and nothing she's said has ever been more true. She leans down.

She keeps it firm and slow first, tongue flat, listening and feeling for Rey's responses, tasting and then really slurping, her own spit and Rey's delicious moisture covering her chin. Rey's moans, louder or softer, are her navigation system. Only about a third of what she's doing gets the really loud ones, and at one point Rey takes her by the ears and presses her face down more firmly till she angles her tongue upward and is rewarded with an agonized sound that's almost a word. Rey's cunt is textured and tender and complex, and Rose feels like she could spend a month here learning it like a language, learning all the parts and machinations of her.

When Rey's thighs start to tremble, Rose repositions her arm and traces lightly right below where her tongue is, and Rey shoves down against her almost hard enough to jam her wrist. Two fingers go in easy, then a third, then a breathless and clutching interval, then everything but her thumb—she's never actually done that and doesn't feel like she should try right now, but Rey is making her want to learn, grunting with each inward push, pulling her in and gripping her while she mouths at Rey's clit. “More,” Rey gasps, and Rose sucks hard.

“Ow,” Rey says, “no, wait, not that, the other thing.”

Which other thing? Rose feels tears starting up, eyes stinging and nose clogging, and then Rey moves her again, but gently this time, so gently, lifting her up to look her in the face. “Your hand, I mean,” she says, “fuck me with your hand, it's so good, I love it, please.”

The “please” undoes her. Rose meets Rey's gaze and fucks her steadily and watches her eyes half-close, her mouth stretch without sound, until she contracts and pulses around Rose's fingers with a hoarse bird cry. Rose lowers her head once more and takes the most delicate of sips until she feels Rey start to relax around her. She pulls her hand away and undoes her crouch and sees Rey's eyes on her again, worry between her brows.

“Come here?” Rose says.

“Yeah,” Rey says. “Yes.”

After hugging for awhile, they step out to piss, well away from the stream. They go together, supposedly for safety, but also because it makes it sort of fun—it reminds Rose of being little and waking Paige up because she didn't want to go to the latrines by herself. The dry moss tickles as their feet crush it. From outside, the tent glows softly blue-white, like someone else's moon.

Back in the tent, Rey takes her hair down, and Rose gets to see it unloop over her bare shoulders for just a second before Rey swiftly and pauselessly gathers it into a single braid. They zip the sleeping bags together and get into them naked. “Is this gross?” Rey wonders aloud. “Other people use these. Maybe they don't want our sex sweat.”

“We'll wash 'em,” Rose mumbles, snuggling into her. “We'll wash everything.”

In the morning, they discover that their piss has turned the dried moss the red of fresh blood, that someone—or several someones—with small three-toed paws has tracked in and out of it, leaving a muddled tracery of scarlet on the black, and that either that creature or someone else has also marked the area, acridly and copiously, as if to overrwrite the mark they made. Rose's fingertip is itching again, and as she finds another fern-frond to rub on it she sends up a brief prayer of thanks to the ancestors that she used her other hand with Rey last night.

They work their way up the other side of the ravine, toward the next plateau over, Rey just a little bit ahead and upslope. She was sweet over breakfast, sitting close and hushing Rose to listen to someone calling in the canopy like a duraluminum windup toy, and packing up the tent brought out the best in the two of them, working like a four-handed creature until they were grinning at each other over the mashed-down spot in the moss where their groundsheet had been. Then Rose got to watch morning practice, watch Rey slide from slow control to fast control and back, each one of her motions waiting in the air for her to step or spin or slash into it. She's elemental, like the wind in the high trees; she's like a perfect piece of engineering. At the end of it, Rose claps for her, and she grins and bows.

But by the time they reach the other side of the ravine and come out on the far plateau, they've drawn apart again and Rose isn't sure why. The plateau is very much like the one where the base is, except that the ground between the scrub bushes and the tussocky grass is looser, dustier, with drifts of darker brown-red among the pink, more gravel and lichen, and tiny, hairy, grey-leaved flowers. Rose hadn't realized how much their plateau had been scarred by the shipbuilding done there for years, even though the signs are similar to the ones she grew up knowing. She points this out to Rey: “I guess I don't know what a healthy planetary surface looks like, but I know what a messed-up one looks like. But the ground around the base just looks normal to me, I guess because it's what I'm used to. But this is what normal is. I mean for here.”

Rey frowns and nods, but doesn't respond in words. The horizon is flat, the air is cool and still. Rose wonders aloud how far the scrub extends. Rey says she doesn't know. Rose asks if Rey wants to take a rations break and gets a grunt. They walk on in silence across the plateau. The ochre and gray of Muyak, Siyak's twin, swings in a low daytime crescent over the horizon.

Finally she says, “Rey, did I make you mad?”

Rey, a few steps ahead in a broad drift of scab-colored soil, stops walking. “No,” she says, sounding wary. “Did I make _you_ mad?”

 _Getting there,_ Rose thinks, but knows better than to say it. “It's just that you're not talking to me.”

"I don't always have anything to say. And I don't always know what to say to you."

Rose starts to spit something out, something hurt, she isn't even sure what, but she holds back again and says instead, "You talk to Finn all the time," which is just as bad, because it's jealous, and petty, and stupid.

Rey looks puzzled. "That's different," she says.

Rose is aware, actually, that it's different, though she would have trouble saying different how. But: "You talk to Poe too."

Rey does look a little sheepish, this time. "Poe's good at making it easy to talk to him."

"And I'm not?" Rose hates how she sounds. She hates that she cares. She hates that there's an answer to this question that she wants more than another.

"You aren't really," Rey says, and moves toward her, quick and graceful, and takes her hands. "But Rose. You're so good at working with me, and kissing me--" her cheeks are pink--"and everything else we did, you're so good at that. And you're so good at noticing plants and bugs and things."

Which is of course the moment that Rose takes another step toward her and the torrent of tiny insects fountains upward, out of the ground they're standing on, and settles on both of them.

The insects are in Rose's hair. They're on her _eyelids._ They're between her fingers. There's a tiny pinch there, and another at her wrist, and it doesn't feel like much but she knows for sure that if all of them bite her she will die. And Rey will die, and they're in her _ears._ Beside her, Rey is still, utterly still, Jedi still, and Rose remembers her listening to the fruiting body by the stream.

"Rey," she says carefully, moving her mouth as little as possible. One of the insects bites her on the lip anyway. "Can you talk to them? Like you did yesterday?"

She doesn't dare scream, and all she wants to do is scream as she waits for Rey's answer. She isn't even sure if Rey understood her. There were a few sounds she didn't want to try making.

Rey doesn't respond out loud, and Rose's stomach sinks. But she realizes that Rey has grown even _more_ still, more quiet, than she was before. And slowly, very slowly, it feels like one at a time, the insects walk down off their bodies and file away across the plateau. One or two deliver their sharp bites in passing, as though to make a point.

Rose exhales, and inhales again, and meets Rey's eyes, and says, “Thank you.”

“No, you,” Rey says. “I wouldn't have thought of it. I _couldn't_ think.” She reaches out and plucks at the corner of Rose's mouth, where one of the insects lingers, and flicks it away. The skin there is tender and hot and Rose is shaking, can't stand to be touched there, anywhere. She crouches down and looks at the place where the insects came from, blood-dark. “Okay,” she says, “look, it looks like the darker soil is underneath and they bring it up when they dig, see how it's piled up? So if we keep to the lighter patches we should be okay, unless there's someone else who lives in the lighter patches that we--”

She stops because Rey has squatted down to face her across the patch of dirt. “Hey,” she says softly, and leans in to kiss the unbitten side of Rose's mouth, just once. “We should get away from their house, before they come back, right?” She stands, a harmonious unfolding, and helps Rose stand too, and leads her onto a stretch of paler ground. They hold onto each other for a while, breathing and feeling each other breathe, until their backs start to ache from standing in one position with their packs on.

“Are you okay to keep going?” Rose says when they move apart. She isn't sure, herself, whether she wants to turn back. Learning Siyak seems more important than it did—who else here might almost kill them? What else would be good for them to know? And what should they change about what they're doing in order to be here?--and also more exhausting. The Resistance is limping as it is. If it's going to take this much effort, isn't that effort that would be better spent on unambiguously Resistance work? And if that's true for Rose, who doesn't matter much, it's a thousand times more true for Rey. Rose was unconscious when Rey saved all of them, but she knows that no one else who's with them _could_ have saved them. Taking Rey away from the fight, not to mention almost getting her _killed_ by _bugs—_

She waits without speaking, wanting to hear first what Rey has to say.

Rey looks at her with a faraway expression that slowly focuses in, until she's so intensely present that Rose's breath catches in her chest. “I don't think anyone's ever asked me that,” she says.

Rose has two options, as far as she can see. She can despair of _coinciding_ with Rey, of talking with instead of past each other, of having their understanding rest in the same place. Or she can keep in mind the ways they do coincide, the ways they work, and pay attention to the girl in front of her, the way she would a fern, a slug, an unfamiliar machine. She can wait again. When Rey says, “I'd like to keep going,” she can say, “Okay, but I want us to think about a couple things before we decide, and I want to eat something before I try to think about anything,” she can wait some more for Rey to weigh what she's just said, and unsling her pack, and take out a ration bar, and break it, and hold half out to Rose and keep half for herself.

 


End file.
